Ben Carson: Defunding Obamacare: ‘Fine’

World-renown pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Benjamin Carson has no problems with losing Obamacare in the quest to find a more affordable, efficient, and patient-friendly healthcare system for the nation.

“There are many more economic models out there that can be used to give us much better healthcare than what we have now,” Carson said on Saturday in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Caucus outside Washington. “If we have to work within the framework of the Affordable Care Act, fine. If we can find a way to defund it, fine.”

His Obamacare suggestion brought rousing cheers from the audience at the Gaylord National Resort in Oxon Hill, Md. “We have to find more efficient ways.”

“Eighty percent of the encounters between a patient and a healthcare provider could easily be handled by a health savings account, without the need to insinuate a third party or a bureaucracy that sucks out at least a third of the money,” he said. “There are ways we can do this: We can use bridge insurance and catastrophic insurance.”

The famed neurosurgeon, who also announced that he was retiring from medicine this summer, hinted at a possible White House bid. “What if you magically put me in the White House?” he hypothetically posed, also to cheers, in an earlier part of his speech.